My blog contains a humorous and inspirational view of life, death, the workplace, spirituality, love, nature, creativity, Hollywood — Plus provocative interviews with some extraordinary participants in the games we all play.

I wake to the steady downpour of the first rain of Winter. It’s light fingers spread across roof then spank the streets. water spills from the eaves thumping the leaves Pelting the tin shed. Thunder punctuates the heavenly orchestration like deafening cymbals, turning the falling curtain of rain into a whispering chorus that’s gentle to the mind, Awakening the senses that life is far more than just a pleasant dream.

Lavender Rose Shall Never Die.

By

Boots LeBaron
Husband, Father, Papa and friend to All.

RIP (7/10/1932-8/25/2017)

Lavender rose,
with the sun filterring through your frail petals,
I hate to see you go.
Bending so pitifully on that prickly stem
with your green leaves rusting yellow,
you are still worthy of great admiration.
In these last moments of existence,
you remain fragrant and memorably exquisite.
Knowing that your time has come
stings my conscience
with an indescribable melancholy.
What a void your absence will create.

Stewart I. Haupman was petting a $2,300 cockatoo when I met him several years ago at his parrot shop in Redondo Beach, California. But he wasn’t always in the exotic bird business.

He grew up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, a tough tenement section brimming with poverty and controlled by gangs. At the age of seven, he sold magazines and sang on weekends at Jewish weddings to help support the family

Sharing a small two-bedroom flat in a tenement house with his parents, grandparents and a brother who had polio, he slept on a cot in the hallway.

When he turned 14, he quit school, forged his father’s signature, and became a stable boy at the old Jamaica Race Track. A year later, he became an exercise boy at Hialeah, a track in Florida.

It was there he got his first mount as a jockey. The third horse he raced, won! Within eight months, he had won 127 races and had become a full-fledged jockey.

Over a period of eight years, riding for Sonny Jim Fitzsimmons, whom he described as “the dean of trainers,” he had won 832 races. “Being a jockey, that was my education. I rode and I broke yearlings for the DuPonts, the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys… “I owe a lot to those people. They taught me to be a human being. I learned to function in an area of society I never even dreamed I could be a part of.”

As a winning jockey, the kid from Hell’s Kitchen not only rubbed elbows with the rich and famous, but found a pride within himself. “The racetrack gave me self-esteem. I had a great time. Winning a big race is an unbelievable experience.

“You hear the crowd yelling, screaming. And You’re whipping and driving. Well, it’s exciting. You wave at the judges in the winner’s circle. There’s smiles. Applause. The track gave me the feeling of being somebody special. Like a track star.”

During a race at Hialeah, his mount “snapped an ankle” and Steward went down in front of the pack. Trampled by six horses, he was “busted up bad” and spent nine months in the hospital, gained weight and lost that competitive edge to win.

“To have success suddenly taken away from you — it was devastating! When you’re a kid, nobody paints you a rosy picture. Nobody tells you there’s a rose garden out there. You find it. Then, all of a sudden, it’s gone. It seems that nobody really teaches you that in life, you win a few and lose a few. You should never quit when you’re down.”

Welcome to my Blog!

Boots LeBaron his legal name since the day he was born in Hollywood on July 10, 1932. He began writing essays, light poetry and interview stories when he was promoted from copyboy to TV staff writer at The Los Angeles Times. In the late 1950s, he volunteered to transfer from the drama department where he was doing interviews and writing the first FM radio column in Los Angeles to working as a crime reporter in the police beat at LAPD's Parker Center. There he learned about life, death and reporting working with newsmen he respectfully describes as "journalistic dinosaurs" representing four other metropolitan newspapers. The beat, he says, made "Front Page," the legendary stageplay and Billy Wilder movie look like a kindergarten class. After a brief stint as a general assignment reporter for The Times, he went into publicity representing the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. For the next 20 years he worked as a motion picture and TV writer-publicist for Universal Studios, was head feature writer for Rogers & Cowan (an international theatrical marketing/PR firm), turned down representing Barbra Steisand to publicize the Chrysler Corp. for Solters & Sabinson. As news division director for Richter, Mracky & Bates he introduced "Give A Hoot, Don't Pollute" and four other ecological slogans for the California state park system, worked as an advertising copy writer, creative director for NPRA, and a free-lance columnist for Los Angeles Copley newspapers including The Daily Breeze which printed more than 840 of his human-interest stories. His by-line articles were also published in The Times, the Los Angeles Examiner, the Herald-Express, as well as Peninsula People Magazine, The Easy Reader and Beach Reporter. As an artist, with the help of animator Walter Lantz, he has illustrated many of his own published stories. He is dyslexic, a former child actor, raised by a single parent (Thelma), the son of a rogue Hall of Fame stuntman (Bert LeBaron). He and his wife, JoAnne, have been married for more than 50 years. They have three adult children and four grandchildren. For the last 20 Years he worked as a writer-publicist at a variety of entertainment companies including Rogers & Cowan, Capitol Records, Universal Studios, and then returned to journalism as a free-lance writer. His stories and columns (some have been nominated for a Pulitzer prize or won other writing awards) were published in newspapers and magazines